Animals Like Us - Animal Politics

Author(s) : Bertrand Loyer, Guillaume Poyet
Director(s) : Guillaume Poyet

Man is not the only social animal. At the beginning of 2001, Franz de Waal published his work on a group of chimpanzees in the Arnhem zoo, in the Netherlands. He showed the existence of elaborate and subtle rites which, according to him, revealed a political organization. This fueled the foundation of an argument much debated in today’s scientific world. Man would therefore no longer stand as the only «political animal » as defined by Aristotle. Schemes, coalitions, and mediation are all aspects of chimpanzee behavior. Long before man took hold of the political domain, nature had provided other animal species with a whole array of political stratagems, from the most cunning to the most egalitarian: polyergus ants ha...